With the outbreak of
World War I
in 1914, France found itself swiftly
overrun by Germany and its allies, and
defended by its old enemy, Britain. At
home, the hitherto anti-militarist trade
union and socialist leaders (Jaurès was
assassinated in 1914) rallied to the
flag and to the forces.
The cost of the war was even greater
for France than for the other
participants because it was fought
largely on French soil. Over a quarter
of the eight million men called up were
either killed or crippled; industrial
production fell to sixty percent of the
prewar level. This - along with memories
of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 - was
the reason that the French were more
aggressive than either the British or
the Americans in seeking war reparations
from the Germans.
In the postwar struggle for
recovery the interests of the urban
working class were again passed over,
save for Clemenceau's eight-hour-day
legislation in 1919. An attempted
general strike in 1920 came to nothing,
and the workers' strength was again
undermined by the formation of new
Catholic and Communist unions, and most
of all by the irreversible split in the
Socialist Party at the 1920 Congress of
Tours. The pro-Lenin majority formed the
French Communist Party , while
the minority faction, under the
leadership of Léon Blum, retained the
old SFIO (Section Française de
l'Internationale Ouvrière) title. The
bitterness caused by this split has
bedevilled the French Left ever since.
Both parties resolutely stayed away from
government.
As the Depression deepened in
the 1930s and Nazi power across the
Rhine became more menacing, fascist
thuggery and antiparliamentary activity
increased in France, culminating in a
pitched battle outside the Chamber of
Deputies in February 1934. The effect of
this fascist activism was to unite the
Left, including the Communists led by
the Stalinist Maurice Thorez, in the
Front Populaire . When they won the
1936 elections with a handsome majority
in the Chamber, there followed a wave of
strikes and factory sit-ins - a
spontaneous expression of working-class
determination to get their just deserts
after a century and a half of
frustration.
Frightened by the apparently
revolutionary situation, the major
employers signed the Matignon
Agreement with Blum, which provided
for wage increases, nationalization of
the armaments industry and partial
nationalization of the Bank of France, a
forty-hour week, paid annual leave and
collective bargaining on wages. These
reforms were pushed through
parliament, but when Blum tried to
introduce exchange controls to check the
flight of capital, the Senate threw the
proposal out and he resigned. The Left
remained out of power, with the
exception of coalition governments,
until 1981. Most of the Front
Populaire's reforms were promptly undone.
